YOU WILL NEED Windows 10 or 11 TIME REQUIRED: Two hours
If you’ve been using a computer for around 20 years (or longer), you’ll remember how important it once was to keep your files organised. Hard drives were less common and – where they existed – were much smaller than the multi-gigabyte behemoths we take for granted today. This meant that a lot of files were stored on floppy disks and, when they got full, archived to Zip drives or CD-ROMs. If you ever wanted to find your work again, without a long and frustrating search across multiple disks, you had to label everything with care.
"There’s no shame in saving every file to your Documents folder and relying on Windows to keep track of things."
Once you found the relevant disk, it might still take you a while to pinpoint the file you wanted – particularly pre-Windows 95 when file names could be no longer than eight characters, with a three-character extension.
Thankfully, things are much easier today. With a large hard drive at your disposal, you can carry on saving your files in the same location for years on end. And, because you are no longer restricted to eight
